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News About Tech, Money and InnovationMon, 03 Aug 2015 00:44:59 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Copyright 2015, VentureBeatWhat will happen to Silicon Valley when demographics strangle the global economyhttp://venturebeat.com/2015/05/11/what-will-happen-to-silicon-valley-when-demographics-strangle-the-global-economy/
http://venturebeat.com/2015/05/11/what-will-happen-to-silicon-valley-when-demographics-strangle-the-global-economy/#commentsTue, 12 May 2015 02:03:02 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1715306OPINION: When the belt-tightening trickles down through the entire ecosystem, what does the rest of Silicon Valley look like without all the easy money sloshing around? Can the Valley even survive?
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OPINION:

If you pay attention to what the various players in tech are reading, you may have seen some of them talking about the book The Accidental Superpower. I heard about the book from Mark Suster and shortly after reading it myself, saw Auren Hoffman posting about it. If you haven’t read it, it generally ignores the common discussions of education, computer technology, and partisan political dysfunction as they relate to the future and looks at the world we will soon face based on broad geopolitical and demographic shifts.

One of the things the author, Peter Zeihan, explains is how the size of the Baby Boomer generation has provided a flood of capital into the global economy, and as they retire and begin to draw money out of the system, capital will become much more scarce. In short, we are at the tail end of a large (Boomer) working and investing population that is about to be replaced by a much smaller (Generation X) working and investing population, and that shift will result in a global capital crunch.

If he’s right, then venture capital as we know it is about to be a thing of the past. As the massive pool of global investment capital dwindles, venture capital as an industry will also shrink as firms find it much harder to raise funds. When the belt-tightening trickles down through the entire ecosystem, what does the rest of Silicon Valley look like without all the easy money sloshing around? Can the Valley even survive? Let’s consider what a cash-starved Silicon Valley might look like.

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Angel Investors. True angels invest with their own money and don’t raise outside funds. Assuming their broad investment portfolios don’t collapse, they should be less affected than the rest of the investment chain because they’re not relying on limited partners, retirement funds such as CalPERS, and Wall Street money. However, angels rely on VCs to take their seed and early investments to the next level. If VCs don’t have the money to fund the next rounds, angels can’t survive.

Second-Tier VCs. Second-tier firms are probably screwed. If global investment dollars are tight, these firms will likely be some of the first players to feel the squeeze. Once they exhaust the funds they’ve already raised, expect many to disappear. If you think the series A crunch is bad now, wait until this entire segment of venture capital goes away.

Large First-Tier VC Funds. Venture capital as an industry won’t disappear completely; expect the blue chip players to continue. Their overall fund sizes might be smaller, though, and expect them to play a little more cautiously. With fewer second-tier firms left to join a funding round, overall dollars invested in companies will decrease even if the first-tier firms stay in business with large funds.

Now let’s think about what this means for the broader ecosystem of Silicon Valley:

Less investment money means fewer startups. Unless tech entrepreneurs figure out how to bootstrap their way to success, this is simple math.

Fewer funded companies means fewer jobs.

Surviving venture capital firms will likely expect profitability to come sooner and be less willing to wait for a liquidity event. This means smaller and shorter term bets.

Unlike other parts of the country whose various industries are largely self-sustaining based on actual profit, much of Silicon Valley is artificially supported by venture capital money. When that money goes away, as it did in 2000-2001, the entire region collapses almost overnight.

If Zeihan’s predictions about demographics and its effect on the global capital supply are correct, then unlike after the first dot-com collapse, the VC industry will not rebound in a few short years, and by extension, the vibrant economy we have come to expect in Silicon Valley will cease to exist.

I don’t know for sure if any of this will happen, I’m only making my best-guess extrapolations of how the Valley will be affected based on the broader predictions put forth by the author. But the effects of changing demographics on an economy have proven to be a prescient predictor. If you’re old enough to remember Japan’s towering success in the late 1980s followed by over two decades of continuing stagnation, then you’ve seen the havoc an aging demographic can wreak on an economy.

If Peter Zeihan is right and capital becomes scarce, the Silicon Valley of today may well prove to be analogous to the Japan of the ’80s, and we are about to go into a long and painful period of decline.

]]>0What will happen to Silicon Valley when demographics strangle the global economyWhat social analytics isn’t telling you this holiday seasonhttp://venturebeat.com/2014/12/24/what-social-analytics-isnt-telling-you-this-holiday-season/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/24/what-social-analytics-isnt-telling-you-this-holiday-season/#commentsWed, 24 Dec 2014 22:00:06 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1631126GUEST: According to social media analytics, when it comes to kids, toys that imitate gadgets used by adults will be hotter than ever. Unfortunately, there’s a huge problem with these predictions.
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GUEST:

With the holiday season in full swing, many retailers have started to predict what gifts will be a hit or miss. Some have done so with the help of social media analytics, as recently reported. According to social media analytics, when it comes to kids, toys that imitate gadgets used by adults will be hotter than ever.

This includes gadgets like the Vtech Kidizoom Smart Watch, My Friend Cayla, and the Skylander Trap Team Starter Pack. Social media trends also point to creativity-enhancing products like action figures and fashion toys. Unfortunately, there’s a huge problem with these predictions — there’s a large chance that the information is highly inaccurate.

Here at Vision Critical, we teamed up with three global brands to release a report on what social media analytics can’t tell companies about their customers, which I co-authored with our VP of Social Media Alexandra Samuel. A major motion picture studio, a renowned broadcasting company, and a cross-category apparel brand compared what thousands of people shared on social media with what those same customers said on their customer intelligence platforms. We classified users into three different groups (lurkers: those posting 1x/week; dabblers: those posting 2-4x/week; and enthusiasts: those posting 5x week or more) and identified five significant blind spots in social media analytics.

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There’s quite a bit that social media analytics can’t tell companies. Those solely relying on social to help predict trends and product wins need to rethink their approach. Based on our findings, here are five things social media analytics can’t tell companies:

Who their customers are

Data shows that almost 90 percent of posts on sites like Facebook and Twitter come from enthusiasts who represent only 30 percent of the social audience. The majority of social media users are lurkers (52 percent), but they’re hardly sharing (5 percent). This means that companies looking at social media data to help learn about their customers and guide their decision-making are missing the mark. Not only are they not hearing their entire social media audience, but they’re missing folks not on social media altogether.

This is further backed up by data from a recent report on social media complainers from VB Insight, which showed how various groups of consumers prefer to continue the conversation away from social channels, moving to telephone, email, and web-based support services. Social media is not the be-all and end-all of customer profiling.

How to serve customers

Big differences exist in how enthusiasts and lurkers shop. Enthusiasts are two times as likely to shop for apparel in big box stores. They’re also frequently looking for the next great buy, and they’re more likely to comparison-shop via mobile while in store. If retailers know this about their social media enthusiasts, they’ll know how to serve them during their shopping experience.

How to market and sell to customers

Regarding media and entertainment, lurkers and enthusiasts have different viewing preferences. Lurkers watch more of nearly every type of TV show, but the difference disappears when it comes to DIY or fashion programs that appeal to engaged, socially oriented enthusiasts. Additionally, enthusiasts follow a wider range of topics on Facebook, but lurkers are just as likely to engage in online gaming as enthusiasts. When companies know how their customers interact with media and what they like, they’ll know how to market and sell better.

How to engage with customers

Enthusiasts are twice as likely to consult their family and friends when making purchasing decisions on clothing. They’re also much more likely to post movie-related content as a way of influencing and informing their friends. On the other hand, lurkers don’t care to influence friends and are less dependent on input from others. This information is valuable for a business looking for influencers and interested in improving customer engagement.

How to become a customer-centric company

As more and more companies look to be customer-centric, including Amazon, Cisco, and many others, understanding customer wants and needs is key for brands in making sure their customers are happy. How people behave on social media is a misrepresentation of the entire social media audience and the overall customer base. Brands need to make sure they’re tuning into more than social media, including transactional data and customer intelligence, in order to predict trends and identify behaviors this holiday season.

In conclusion, if you use social media data alone to determine how to market, sell, and support your customers this holiday season, or at any other time of year, you’re missing a huge piece of the targeting pie.

A case in point: the gadgets-as-toys that are trending on social media. It’s just the kind of trend that gets exaggerated by social media analytics. That’s because enthusiasts are disproportionately likely to be gadget freaks themselves — mobile devices are a bigger part of their shopping experience — and they’re more likely to follow tech news on Facebook. Tune into social media analytics, and the people you are hearing from are the people who are most likely to be excited about tech-oriented toys and gifts.

Will those tech-themed gifts actually appear under the Christmas tree? Santa knows. Social media analytics don’t.

]]>0What social analytics isn’t telling you this holiday seasonNew App Annie product offers detailed demographics of over a billion app usershttp://venturebeat.com/2014/12/04/new-app-annie-product-offers-detailed-demographics-of-over-a-billion-app-users/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/04/new-app-annie-product-offers-detailed-demographics-of-over-a-billion-app-users/#commentsThu, 04 Dec 2014 11:51:23 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1617816For the first time, mobile publishers can quickly assess the demographic profile of their users, compare it to those of their competitors’ apps, and easily make accurate data-driven decisions about who to target in acquisition campaigns. Now we’ll know that pimply teen boys are the core Clash of Clans userbase, for instance, instead of guessing. Today, App Annie is releasing Audience […]
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For the first time, mobile publishers can quickly assess the demographic profile of their users, compare it to those of their competitors’ apps, and easily make accurate data-driven decisions about who to target in acquisition campaigns.

Now we’ll know that pimply teen boys are the core Clash of Clans userbase, for instance, instead of guessing.

Today, App Annie is releasing Audience Intelligence, a demographic profiling tool that can tell mobile developers the age, gender, income, education, and other standard demographic details about their users. But publishers can also use the tool to check the profile of other apps’ users, compare the two pictures, and contrast both with the general app-installing population on either of the major mobile platforms.

Besides surveying or other laborious forms of collection, app publishers haven’t had a simple way to get this data, which of course is useful for product development, user acquisition, partnerships, and probably even company acquisition efforts.

The information is based on all the myriads of data each of us generate daily, just by living digitally.

“As individuals download apps, leave reviews, and comment on social media, they are generating billions of footprints showing preferences and activity,” App Annie CEO Bertrand Schmitt told me via email. “App Annie has spent the last few years building big data technologies that aggregate, anonymize and analyze these footprints at a massive scale in order to construct a clear demographic profile of a mobile app’s user base.”

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The company’s tools are already see users from publishers of over 600,000 apps, App Annie says — including apps from 90 percent of the top 100 companies. The company has tracked the downloads of more than 79 billion apps, not to mention app revenue in excess of $22 billion.

App Annie doesn’t release the number of app users that it reaches, but with numbers like that, it could hardly fail to be a majority of smartphone owners globally — a number that is approaching two billion.

That is a serious amount of demographic data.

Some examples of the data Audience Intelligence can deliver include these, which App Annie shared with me:

Men downloaded two-thirds of iOS travel apps in a recent 12-month period.

On-demand transit apps such as Uber, Lyft, and Easy Taxi users are even more skewed toward men.

Older audiences frequently download weather apps, with half of the downloads coming from people ages 35 and over.

Sports apps, including ESPN SportsCenter and Yahoo Sports, are heavily skewed toward males — with over three-fourths of downloads coming from men

Using the new tools enables app publishers to identify related apps, App Annie says, and also complementary apps — which you might want to partner with in a mutually beneficial user-acquisition campaign. In addition, freemium apps can tailor their pricing and product to a better understanding of core audience.

And here’s another massive use case: advertising.

As an EA exec said yesterday, mobile games may become the largest ad platform for advertising. While that’s hyperbole, few doubt that games have huge potential, along with other mobile apps, to be massive advertising ecosystems. And shockingly, brands want to advertise to known quantities of users with known characteristics … something a mobile publisher can now demonstrate with data it can validate externally.

Not to mention mobile apps’ own advertising.

“App developers and publishers … can also implement more effective user acquisition on ad networks that offer advanced targeting by understanding the demographics their users and targeting accordingly,” Schmitt says.

The product has already been released in private beta, and while App Annie won’t reveal specifics of the results, Schmitt says that publishers who were using it said it gave them data they could not previously access, often even for their own apps.

Later this year the company will add sentiment analysis for user reviews, Schmitt said, track sentiment trends, and rate apps on metrics like stability, usability, and stickiness.

Now, he said, mobile publishers can understand the users behind the apps — their own … and everyone else’s.

]]>0New App Annie product offers detailed demographics of over a billion app usersOnly 16% of U.S. adults use Twitter (but they’re smart, young, and rich)http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/04/only-16-of-u-s-adults-use-twitter-but-theyre-smart-young-and-rich/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/11/04/only-16-of-u-s-adults-use-twitter-but-theyre-smart-young-and-rich/#commentsMon, 04 Nov 2013 19:28:56 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=853524Only 16 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, and only half of them get news via the short-message social network, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center. That’s far fewer than Facebook, where 30 percent of American adults get their news. The good news for Twitter? Twitter users skew younger, more educated, more […]
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Only 16 percent of U.S. adults use Twitter, and only half of them get news via the short-message social network, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center. That’s far fewer than Facebook, where 30 percent of American adults get their news.

The good news for Twitter?

Twitter users skew younger, more educated, more mobile, and more wealthy. Oh, and they’re more male too, than Facebook users.

Twitter users are more likely to make more than $75,000 a year than Facebook users — 48 percent to 41 percent — and also more likely to be male: 50 percent versus Facebook’s 42 percent. Those facts may, of course, be related, as men tend to earn more than women even to this day. In addition, Twitter users are more likely to be young, with 45 percent of them between 18 and 29 years of age, versus 34 percent of Facebook users, and more likely to be better educated, with at least 40 percent of them earning a Bachelor’s degree or more, versus 30 percent for Facebook.

Still, with all that good news for a dream advertisers’ demographic, it’s hard to get around that one core glaring statistic: Only a small slice of American’s actually use the social media darling of the now.

More information:

]]>0Only 16% of U.S. adults use Twitter (but they’re smart, young, and rich)Reddit punches far above its weight as only 6% of online adults use it (but 11% of Hispanics)http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/04/reddit-punches-far-above-its-weight-as-only-6-of-online-adults-use-it-but-11-of-hispanics/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/04/reddit-punches-far-above-its-weight-as-only-6-of-online-adults-use-it-but-11-of-hispanics/#commentsFri, 05 Jul 2013 00:20:47 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=775083Reddit, the self-styled "front page of the internet" that has can send floods of traffic to unsuspecting sites and has luminaries like President Obama visiting to answer questions directly from the great unwashed, is only visited by six percent of online American adults, according to the Pew Research Center.
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Reddit, the self-styled “front page of the Internet” that has can send floods of traffic to unsuspecting sites and has luminaries like President Barack Obama visiting to answer questions directly from the great unwashed, is only visited by 6 percent of American adults who are online, according to the Pew Research Center.

Pew’s newest Internet & American Life Project also says that, unsurprisingly, a larger percent of young males frequent the site — 15 percent — while only 5 percent of women age 18-29 visit Reddit.

Those number might compare poorly to Twitter, which 16 percent of the population uses, and particularly Facebook, which boasts a 67 percent share. But Reddit’s passionate and engaged community has resulted in celebrities and scientists — including the wealthiest man in the world, Bill Gates — visiting the site so that Redditors can “ask them anything.” Neither Facebook nor Twitter can boast something similar.

Reddit revealed some amazing traffic numbers for 2012: 37 billion pageviews, 400 million unique visitors, four billion votes, 30 million posts, and 260 million comments. And the community that makes that possible was one of the driving forces behind today’s July 4 “Restore the Fourth” movement against NSA/PRISM surveillance.

Interestingly, while the site is overwhelmingly male, it’s fairly multiethnic. While only 5 percent of white adults use Reddit, 4 percent of black adults do, and a much larger 11 percent of Hispanic adults visit Reddit as well.

]]>0Reddit punches far above its weight as only 6% of online adults use it (but 11% of Hispanics)Forrester on mobile marketing: who you do — and do not — want to targethttp://venturebeat.com/2012/12/06/forrester-on-mobile-marketing-who-you-do-and-do-not-want-to-target/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/12/06/forrester-on-mobile-marketing-who-you-do-and-do-not-want-to-target/#commentsThu, 06 Dec 2012 21:44:55 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=585766Forrester released a new report today on mobile marketing. As it turns out, there's only one group of mobile customers that marketers want to target. Big shocker: It's not the 7 percent of American adults who still refuse to use a mobile phone.
]]>Forrester released a new report today on mobile marketing. As it turns out, there’s only one group of mobile customers that marketers want to target.

Big shocker: It’s not the 7 percent of American adults who still refuse to use a mobile phone.

Most American adults now do own cell phones — and it seems sometimes that most kids do too. But for the purposes of mobile marketers, Forrester analyst Melissa Parrish segmented adult American phone owners into five categories:

Talkers
Forget these … they only use their phones as — yikes — phones. Twenty-five percent of American adults, only use their phones to talk.

Communicators
Communicators, who make up another 16 percent of American adults, are a little more adventurous than Talkers. They use newfangled technology like SMS to text each other in addition to talking on their phones.

Connectors
Connectors step it up another notch — but only for work. They talk, text, and use “advanced services” like apps at least once a month, but these Jacks and Jills are dull boys and girls, focused almost entirely on their careers. Can we just say right now that these are BlackBerry owners?

Entertainers
Parrish classifies the second biggest chunk of American adults as “entertainers.” A better description might be “entertained.” This 38 percent of adults in the country use their phones to talk and text, but also to listen to music, watch videos, and play games. Neil Postman would be like, terribly amused.

SuperConnecteds
The biggest chunk of all have both feet firmly planted in the modern world of smartphones and LTE, using apps to network, research, and buy products, check the news and weather, and manage their bank accounts. It’s just even conceivable that they might actually talk on their phones once or twice a day.

(There is some overlap between categories — “for example, SuperConnecteds may also play games at least weekly, and thus also qualify as Entertainers,” Forrester’s Lara Cole explains — which is why the percentages don’t add up to 100.)

According to Parrish, just because 93 percent of Americans own mobile phones, that doesn’t mean they are all valid targets for mobile marketing activities. In fact, quite the opposite. Only the SuperConnecteds — 48 percent of Americans — are the consumers you want to reach.

“These are the users you can engage through innovative and advanced mobile marketing programs,” Parrish says in the report.

Also in the report: how to start mobile marketing, methods of strategic planning, and using an addressability framework (a way of conceptualizing customers based on context, needs, and technology).

]]>0Forrester on mobile marketing: who you do — and do not — want to targetFacebook, Twitter, and teens: who’s winning the youth warhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/10/15/facebook-twitter-and-teens-whos-winning-the-youth-war/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/15/facebook-twitter-and-teens-whos-winning-the-youth-war/#commentsMon, 15 Oct 2012 22:42:29 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=557418Sure, Facebook is the world's largest social network -- and the one currently ranked highest by teens. But don't count the little blue bird out yet: Twitter just might be winning the youth numbers game.
]]>Sure, Facebook is the world’s largest social network — and the one currently ranked highest by teens. But don’t count the little blue bird out yet: Twitter just might be winning the youth numbers game.

A recent Piper Jaffray survey of 7000 U.S. teens ranked Facebook first in importance to teens. Twitter came in second, and Instagram — owned, of course, by Facebook — came in third. Detailed results, including how big the differences are, were not released, but Gene Munster, a Piper Jaffray analyst, said that Facebook is well positioned to stay top dog in social networks for teens.

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In that survey, which analyzed social media use at 24 different social networks, the average age of Facebook users is 40.5 years, while the average age of Twitter users is slightly younger, at 37.2. And when Pingdom compared the results to a previous study, the website performance monitoring company found that while the average age of Facebookers has increased by two years since 2010, the average of Twitter users has decreased by the same amount.

And it matches up with Beevolve’s recent survey of a whopping 36 million Twitter users. In Beevolve’s study, almost three quarters of users who disclose their age on Twitter are aged 15 to 25. That needs to be taken with a big fat grain of salt, as most of Twitter’s 500+ million users don’t disclose their age on the site, but is still an interesting indicator of a sizable youth contingent on Twitter.

A possible explanation?

Facebook has more than double Twitter’s users. At over a billion daily active users to Twitter’s perhaps 550 to 600 million total users, there’s a massive size advantage. Take into account the percentage of monthly active users out of Twitter’s total userbase — about a third — and the difference becomes even more apparent.

Daily active Facebook to Twitter users is probably about a five to one ratio … a billion to maybe 200 million. And that’s even before you take Instagram into account.

Which means that even if the average age of Twitter users is young, and perhaps on a percentage basis Twitter has more teens than Facebook, Facebook still easily has Twitter beat.

But that may yet change in the future, if the current demographic trends on social network continue.

Performance monitoring service Pingdom has done another one of its mammoth social media studies, this one on the demographics of social media sites — every site imaginable, one would think, except for Google+. (Because Google+ is not directly monetized yet, the service does not appear in DoubleClick Ad Planner, the tool Pingdom uses to gather the data.)

The average ages of social media users holds no surprises … more than half are between 25 and 44 years old, with only 5 percent under 17 and only 1 percent over 65. The absolute average across all social networks is 36.9 percent.

More interesting is Pingdom’s graph showing the distribution of people across all the surveyed networks, showing that deviantART is the youngest social network and LinkedIn is the oldest:

Above: Age distribution across social networks

Image Credit: Pingdom

Interestingly, Google’s Orkut — big in Brazil — stands out as the social network with the largest chunk of its users in the 35-44 demographic.

(Which, if the data is correct, shows why Orkut is starting to falter: very few users in the younger, more dynamic segments. But I have my doubts on this one, since all of Pingdom’s data is U.S.-based, and Orkut is not big Stateside.)

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Another interesting stat, this on on gender: 71 percent of the sites Pingdom checked are dominated by women.

The geek and propellerhead sites Slashdot, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, and Github buck this trend, being the sausagefests of the social networking world. Between 70 percent and 90 percent of their communities are male. Quora and Orkut are also male-dominated, as is Reddit.

It’s no shock that Pinterest is female-dominated, with a 79 percent ratio. Reading social network Goodreads is also heavily female, and then there are a lot of other sites that are in the 50 percent to 60 percent range: Tumblr, Tagged, Yelp, and Flickr.

Both of today’s social networking heavyweight champions, Twitter and Facebook, fall into this category.

Price, brand, and apps are the three words you need to keep in mind if you are trying to sell tablets.

So says analytics firm comScore, which just published the first set of results from TabLens, its new insights service focused on tablet users. TabLens looked at 6,000 U.S. tablet users over a three-month span to get its numbers, and while most of the results are interesting, few of them are particularly groundbreaking.

The study found, for instance, that iPad owners tend to be wealthy young males, while most Kindle Fire users are female. For most of these Kindle Fire owners, price was the primary consideration in their purchases, which, again, isn’t a surprise: At $200, the Kindle Fire is far cheaper than the $500 iPad, so price is clearly going to be a major buying factor.

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iPad owners, on the other hand, were more concerned with app selection, which had the largest impact on their purchases. Second to that was the tablet’s brand, which clearly carries a lot of weight for Apple products in general.

So why did comScore put the Kindle Fire in its own category rather than under the Android umbrella? Apparently, it was trying to show off what its TabLens service can do.

“We did that to show further audience granularity for this specific analysis,” comScore marketing manager Sarah Radwanick told VentureBeat by email. “TabLens allows for filtering so clients have the ability to look at multiple cuts of data – i.e. ‘All Android tablets’, ‘Android excluding Kindle Fire’, ‘Android tablets by OEM’, etc.”

comScore says that one of the more surprising findings was that tablet users didn’t seem too concerned with having their tablets and smartphones run the same operating system. This, the company says, is good news for Microsoft, which could still see success with its Surface tablet even though Windows Phone still isn’t doing so hot.

comScore also says that TabLens data can be used by groups as diverse as advertisers, manufacturers, network operators, and publishers. The company offers a similar service, MobiLens, to track usage habits among smartphone users.

]]>0comScore: iPad owners are young and rich, Kindle owners more price-consciousWeb companies are ignoring the lucrative 50+ demographichttp://venturebeat.com/2012/04/19/419199/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/19/419199/#commentsThu, 19 Apr 2012 22:18:46 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=419199If you found that 60 to 80 percent of your customers belonged to a particular demographic, you’d probably retarget your marketing and product development efforts to focus on that market. Yet many internet companies are failing to do just that. The population in question is the growing slice of the American population 50 years old […]
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If you found that 60 to 80 percent of your customers belonged to a particular demographic, you’d probably retarget your marketing and product development efforts to focus on that market.

Yet many internet companies are failing to do just that.

The population in question is the growing slice of the American population 50 years old and up. According to Steve Jurvetson, a managing director at venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Jody Holtzman, a senior vice president at AARP, many digital companies are doing nothing to accommodate older consumers. The two spoke in a panel discussion today at DEMO Spring 2012 in Santa Clara, Calif., an event co-produced by VentureBeat.

According to Jurvetson, people in this demographic:

consume 60 percent of all consumer goods,

consume 80 percent of all leisure travel, and

shop online 3X as much as 18-34 year olds.

“Demographics is destiny. This is going to shift markets all over the world,” Jurvetson said.

Additionally, the total annual consumer spending by baby boomers is $2.5 trillion, with $1 trillion of that spent by those 65 and up, Holtzman said. By comparison, people in Generation Y spend only $800 billion per year.

“You go onto Expedia, or Travelocity, you wouldn’t know that 80 percent of leisure travel buyers are 50+ from looking at those sites. It’s like they don’t know who their customers are,” Holtman said. For example, fonts are small and difficult to read with older eyes, and there’s no option to make the type size larger.

Travel sites aren’t the only unwitting beneficiaries of an older user demographic. For example, in the popular PC multiplayer game Wizard 101, which is aimed at 7-12 year olds, it turns out that many players are quite a bit older.

“The amount of intergenerational play between kids and their parents and grandparents is a huge part of the game,” Holtzman said.

In the end, designing for the broadest possible demographic just makes sense, because it opens you to the largest market.

“It’s an opportunity for making sure that you maximize your market,” Holtzman said. “When you build something that a 5-year-old or an 85-year-old can use, like an iPad, you’re maximizing your market opportunity.”

[Update: Jurveston has just posted some more thoughts on this, including the observation that children hit their peak at 2 to 3 years old, with 10x the synapses and 2x the energy burn of an adult brain, but that adults can slow their decline through mental exercise.]

]]>0Web companies are ignoring the lucrative 50+ demographicForrester reveals who uses location-based services the mosthttp://venturebeat.com/2010/12/10/forrester-location-based-services/
http://venturebeat.com/2010/12/10/forrester-location-based-services/#commentsFri, 10 Dec 2010 15:09:09 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=232053While only 4 percent of US online adults have ever used a location-based service, like popular check in app Foursquare, data from research firm Forrester shows that young adult males with college degrees appear to be the main user group. In addition to being the main user group, the group may also be heavy online influencers […]
]]>While only 4 percent of US online adults have ever used a location-based service, like popular check in app Foursquare, data from research firm Forrester shows that young adult males with college degrees appear to be the main user group.

In addition to being the main user group, the group may also be heavy online influencers as 38% of them claim that their networks ask them for their opinion before making a purchase decision. It would be interesting to know what types of products their networks ask them about before a purchase. Most likely, it’s probably electronics.

Finally, the data shows that the group may also be heavy mobile researchers, meaning that they are more likely to search for information on products or services as well as look up ratings and reviews. If the user group is constantly checking in to locations, then they are probably also using their smartphones for the following.

The nifty graph below spotlights more specifics location-based service users to US online adult users.